In conventional environments, encryption and decryption is usually performed by software. Due to the complexity involved with performing encryption, the host processor can be greatly burdened with this encryption task. This task burden is commensurate with the degree of security provided by the encryption. Unfortunately, availability of very fast computing hardware has allowed criminals to realistically apply brute-force decryption techniques to private data. Previously, typical encryption methods, such as the Data Encryption Standard (DES), used encryption key lengths of around 40–60 bits, and were considered secure.
But, as several well-publicized contests by RSA Data Security Inc. have shown, such key lengths can be compromised in a matter of days or hours. Thus, to compensate, longer key lengths (e.g., 1024 bits or higher) and more complex encryption schemes are required. This then increases the burden on the host processing system.
Such security concerns have driven efforts to provide secure networking protocols, such as Internet Protocol (IP) security, or IPSEC, promulgated by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) (see IPSEC proposals at Internet location http://www.ietf.org/ids.by.wg/ipsec.html.) This modified IP protocol refers to encrypting IP data traffic with large key lengths and complex encryption algorithms. But, as noted above, such keys and algorithms burdens a host processor already responsible for general networking overhead, and overhead from executing other host processes.